Red Bird

X Play, f2.0, 1/120, ISO 64, JPG

Kiteflying

OPO, f2.0, 1/4836, ISO 100, JPG

Blackheath Bike & Kite Festival 2009

The 2nd Blackheath Bike and Kite Festival was on today. The weather was great so there were a lot of people around. I went out to take some pictures with the Panasonic LC1 and ended up taking more pictures of kites than bikes but it was good fun and the LC1 performed just fine and I was quite glad that it did have a zoom.
You can see the full gallery here.

Moonshape

GRD II, f2.4, 1/2, ISO 100, RAW, 40mm

Took this while walking home after work today. I liked how the shape of the kite looked like the shape of the moon above and even the yellow color of the kite matched the moon.

Kite Flying

CX1, f5.1, 1/710, ISO 80, JPG, 135mm

While out for a walk I saw this girl really excited about the kite flying, it was very nice to see and I took a few pictures to try and capture her joy.

The CX1 is probably not a low light camera due to the slow lens and not so great high ISO proformance as it's usual on cameras with small sensors. But using it in a dimly lit club on easy mode and utilizing the flas it did a very good job and produced pictures with accurate colors and low noise (but high NR at times). It did do pretty well compared with the other p&s cameras there although it is not quite a GRD I that can shoot without flash at ISO 1600 and produce very good quality images.

Caught

GRD, f4, 1/30, ISO 400, JPG

Took this while out for a walk this evening, the red stood out against the grey sky. This picture is not a cut-out but a full color picture where the only tweak was using manual WB in camera and saturating the reds slightly more in post processing. I added some vignetting to draw the focus more to the center of the frame.

High in the Sky

GRD II, f5.6, 1/640, ISO 80, RAW

The weather was great again today so made the best out of it and went for a long walk around Blackheath and Greenwich. Despite this, I only took a few pictures and this was my favorite one. I wanted to get the shadow of the kite in there and managed it in this picture.
Despite what everyone says, for me the GRD II just has more noise and less details compared with the GRD I even when developing the RAW files. Maybe I am just not good enough at processing RAW files but I never managed to get GRD II RAW files to look as crisp as the JPGs and RAW files from the GRD I. Even at low ISOs the GRD II does not work for me as well and RAW is not the answer.